“Everyone wins and loses sometimes. Defeat sometimes is worth as much as a good victory. As long as you don’t give up because you are getting tired or getting hurt or getting scared. I would be proud of you guys if you challenge and show your strong spirit.”
Toshi: Sensei, I found these very old photos. Please have a look.
Aso: Oh, everyone is very young.
Toshi: This one is right after my fight. I broke my hand and my knee. Sensei is holding me to support me standing. I remember I couldn’t do well in that fight, so I look a bit depressed, but Sensei, you said you were proud of me. That made me feel a little bit better.
Aso: Everyone wins and loses sometimes. Defeat sometimes is worth as much as a good victory. As long as you don’t give up because you are getting tired or getting hurt or getting scared. I would be proud of you guys if you challenge and show your strong spirit.
Toshi: I had a lot of precious experiences when I was training with Sensei in Japan about 30 years ago. The Japanese martial arts world was still a very closed society more than 30 years ago, but Sensei tried to interact actively with other martial arts styles and organisations. Sensei sometimes took us to different martial arts gyms to train such as Karate, Muay Thai, Wrestling, Sambo, UWF pro wrestling, etc. And let us compete with them, and organised for training competitions and actual fights too. There was no MMA fighting system back in that time, so every competition and fight was our trial. Going back to the dojo to study the previous fight, learn, practice, and fix techniques after every fight, then trying that in next fight. Doing that over and over developed my fighting system and that’s what I am teaching now to my students.
Aso: There are a lot of different types of people in the world. That’s why it is important to get used to different types of opponents from different martial arts styles. Many people worry about having unknown experiences, but after all, it makes big difference between people who have a lot of experience and who haven’t. Experience makes people bigger not only as martial artists but also as human beings, so I tried to let you guys have those experiences.
Toshi: Talking about experience, I remember we tried a lot of different rules of fighting too. I think some fights probably wouldn’t be permitted with the rules today. For example, “There is no tap out for chokes”, that means even if you tap out from any chokes, the referee wouldn’t stop the fight until you passed out. People used to say “What a crazy dangerous thing you guys do!!’ and “You will have a lot of people with broken necks!!”, but it ended up we didn’t have any big accidents. Instead, I got a big breakthrough from that experience. Because choke techniques can become a neck crank at any time, so if we put on a crank, and they were tapping out, the referee thought that it was choke, so didn’t stop fight. Then the opponent gets extra adrenaline from the survival instinct and will have unbelievable power and energy and tried to escape from the crank like hell. We had to apply everything properly to choke out that kind of opponent. If we just squeeze with our strength, that can become just a crank or just get a sore throat, and also we run out of gas and lose strength, but if we apply the choke properly, it is actually easier to choke out someone who struggles to get out like hell, because their heart rate gets higher. I thought Sensei held that kind of fight, trying to make us realise those kind of things.
Aso: It is a matter of course if your opponent tries to escape from your technique with more than 100% effort, when there is no referee in the street situations. Being able to choke out easily against that kind of opponents is the real technique. Neck submissions such as cranks or any spine submissions could be life endangering techniques. Striking is same isn’t it?. One punch might kill your opponent in a street situation. You might have an extreme self defence situations where you have to use them, but In modern times where we are living now, you don’t want to kill them every time you protect yourself. It is safer for you and your opponent to use proper choke techniques and put them to sleep. As long as you know when to stop, then wake them up later. That’s the real self defence technique which is protecting you from your opponent and protecting you from going to jail. That’s why attaining proper good choke techniques is very important.
To be continued Part 5, “The final conversation”.
